A Year of Not Writing

 

In two weeks, it will be a year since I wrote any new fiction. For the twenty years before that, I did some writing on a new “work in progress” nearly every day of my life. I wrote on holidays, on vacations, on my birthday, when I was sick. I wrote whenever I could.

But a year ago I decided to enter the world of self-publishing. I started with putting up some of my backlist as ebooks. I had them scanned, then had to proof them and edit them (I’m a better writer than I was twenty years ago!) I paid to have them formatted, but I still had to find the stock photos for the cover art, write blurbs, set up accounts at the ebook vendors, upload them and do a little bit of promotion to let people know they were available.

A few months into it I decided to release two of my unpublished novels that I hadn’t been able to sell. These required a lot more proofing, as well as covers and blurbs and all the rest. A couple of months later, I decided to release one of the new books in print. I needed real cover art, decisions about size, price and format. When that book became available, I did some local promotion, including booksignings and bookmarks.

Self-publishing became my full-time, part-time job. (I have two other jobs, working at the library and helping with my husband’s business.) Editing my older books, which required rewriting in some places, kept me sane. But in my heart I longed for the day when I could really write again. (And also worried that I wouldn’t remember how!)

By the end of next month I will have ten ebooks available (including a “boxed set” of my Dragon of the Island series). I will also have two books available in print.

Was my decision worth it?

Creatively? Yes. It’s very satisfying to have readers again reading my stories. I’m no longer writing in a vacuum. And all that editing honed my writing skills even if it wasn’t as satisfying as “real” writing.

Financially? Yes. It cost me about $250 to produce each ebook, and there were additional expenses for the print copies. I have been making about $200 a month in sales, but the two Regency romances I put up earlier this month have really taken off, and with them it may take me less than a year to pay for my expenses. (If you don’t count my other writing expenses like my new computer, which I figure I would have bought anyway.) After that, I’ll finally be making a profit.

For me, adding the job of “publisher” to my already busy life was the right decision. I had a backlist that was relatively easy to re-publish. I also had several finished manuscripts mostly ready to go. Counting the rest of my backlist and completed (if still rough) manuscripts, I still have another nine books I could potentially put out as ebooks, not to mention a dozen partial manuscripts I could theoretically finish and publish.  

But even though self-publishing was the right choice for me, I don’t think it’s the best path for every writer. If you’re someone who struggles to write regularly, who has a love-hate relationship with the process and isn’t very productive, then self-publishing might end up being an excuse not to write.

If you’ve only finished one or two books, or even three or four, I would suggest you to spend your time writing instead of caught up in the self-publishing process. Unless the books are all in a series, which gives you a better base to work from. The more books an author has available, the easier it is to develop a presence in the ebook market.

The fact is, if you’ve never been published traditionally, I would think long and hard about going the “indie” publisher route. There are dozens of copies of my early print books available on Amazon, and have been for years. If you’re just starting out and nobody’s ever heard of you, it’s going to be more difficult to get readers to find your books.

I’ve spent the last ten years trying to sell the three new titles I’ve published. They’ve all been shopped around extensively. Indeed, I still have two manuscripts out with a publisher. I could release these books myself, but I believe having them published by a big-name house would help boost the sales of my other ebooks. For the great majority of authors, being traditionally published is a much faster, surer route to success (and profit) than self-publishing.

Finally, you have to consider whether your stories are in a popular genre. If they are, then going the indie route might make sense. If they’re not, well… you really might be wasting your time and money to self-publish.

For years I tried to sell the fourth book in my dark age historical romance series.  A lot of editors wouldn’t even look at the manuscript because of the time period. And it turns out they were right to doubt the salability of the book.  It’s my slowest selling ebook. However, I just put up two Regency romances and they’re selling amazingly well. They’ve been available for two weeks and I’ve already sold more copies of each of them than I’ve sold of all my other books combined (for the month). I still believe there are readers who would love my dark age series. But in the crowded marketplace it’s going to take a long time for those readers to find me.  If you’re writing in a popular genre/sub-genre, readers will discover your books much more quickly.

And finally, a word of warning. Although it’s happened and sometimes ends up being a fabulous Cinderella story, don’t expect that self-publishing will lead to a traditional publishing house discovering you and offering you a contract. This is in the very rare category, and probably requires extraordinary good luck and/or divine intervention.

Now, for me, back to writing!

 

The Downside of Indie Publishing

My last post on my venture in self-publishing ebooks reflected the exhilaration and sense of empowerment the process gave me. Since then I've come down to earth...it was a bit of a bumpy landing.

I uploaded my first books in late November and over the next two months, my sales built slowly but surely. In January, with five titles for sale, I sold over 100 books on Amazon. In March, with seven titles available, that figure went down to 80. At Barnes and Noble, the gradual increase was similar, but the decline even steeper. This month, unless things pick up, and despite my doing a free promo, (more on that later) I may sell fewer books than I did in December. Granted, I've done very little to promote my books, but still it's discouraging.

It cost me an average of $250 to put up each book (including scanning, cover art and formatting). In January, I made about $200, which meant I was on pace to earn back my investment and actually start making money in six to eight months. Now I wonder if it won't take a year. And since I intend to put up more books, and incur more costs, who knows when I'll actually turn a profit. Right now, the loss actually helps with our taxes, but that won't always be the case. And until I start making money, I feel like it's barely a step up from vanity publishing.

My sales at Amazon have far out-paced my sales at Barnes and Noble and Smashwords (Smashwords distributes to Itunes, Sony and other ebook outlets), so I decided to enroll one of my poorest selling books in Amazon's KDP Select program. By giving them exclusive distribution for three months, I have the chance to list my ebook as free for five days.

I used two of those free days this weekend, and the results were underwhelming. The book made it to #18 on the free historical romance list and had over 1000 downloads. I sold about 20 copies of my other titles this weekend, which almost doubled my sales for the month, but I'm still not on pace to do as well as I did in January.

It probably goes back to my abysmal promotion efforts/abilities. I hope to get better and do more, but there's a limit to the time I can commit to that and still have time to work on new projects. And since my passion for writing is what got me in to this, having the time to write is pretty important.

The other hard reality I've had to face with self-publishing is that there are some aspects of the process I really suck at (besides promotion).  I'm planning to release one of my self-published ebooks in print. This book is the fourth in a series, and since the other three came out in print (albeit a long time ago), I want this one to also be available in that format. Before I had the book formatted, I had two writer friends read it and look for errors and I proofed it myself several times. We're now in the second phase of proofing the pdf before sending to print and I'm still finding errors! Mostly missing words I somehow missed the first, second, third, etc. time around.

There were enough errors that I paid my formatter to redo the file so I could re-upload it. (More expense.) And this process has taught me that I'm going to have to pay someone for proofreading my original material before I release it, which will double (or more) my costs of releasing every book as an ebook.

I'm beginning to wonder if the thrill of having these books out is going to be worth it. Can I justify continuing with this process?

They say that with every book you put up, you increase your chances of readers finding you. And I'm definitely in this for the long haul. I have another ten books I could potentially e-publish. And that doesn't count the ones that are partially written or that I have in my head. Maybe one of them will grab readers in a way none of these early ones have, and my sales will take off.

I'm an optimist, so we'll go with that.

Self-publishing...it aint what it used to be.

A little over six months ago, I entered the world of e-publishing. I decided to do so after a lot of soul-searching and agonizing. It wasn't the ebook part that worried me, so much as the self-publishing aspect. Self-publishing—yikes! That meant being responsible for every detail of my books on my own. No editor and copyeditor to catch my grammatical or logic errors, no art department to design my cover, no marketing department to get my books into stores, to promote and advertise them (in as much as my publisher ever did). Instead, as a self-published author, every sale would ultimately depend on me.

Over the years I've participated in several booksignings with self-published authors, and I was always in awe of their ambition and, to my mind, their daring. I could sit there at the signing table, watching the store customers ignore us, and while I might have been disappointed, I never really worried. My career wasn't going to survive or not based on how many books I sold that day. My writing income didn't depend on getting one of those busy, and often harried and disinterested, shoppers to buy my book. That's because while I was sitting there in some store in Wyoming or Colorado, my book was on the shelves of hundreds of bookstores and other retail outlets around the country. Since there was no way for me, personally, to effectively promote my book to all those anonymous potential customers, I was pretty much off-the-hook.

Self-publishing would mean that not only was my ego, my effort, my dream, at risk, but my money. I have to say that if my family was as "financially challenged" as we were back then, and if self-publishing an e-book cost as much as it did to publish a print book in the days before print-on-demand machines, I might still not have taken the leap. To invest hundreds of dollars in books that I had to sell all on my own while we struggling to pay the mortgage and feed and cloth two school-age children, would have simply been too risky.

But now our household is in a better place economically, and since publishing each ebook only costs me a little over $200 (and could be done for even less by someone who had the time and technological savvy to do the formatting and cover art on their own), self-publishing has become a reasonable investment. I'm still pretty daunted at the idea of marketing my ebooks, but even without doing any real promoting, in three months my sales have built from a few each week, to a few each day. Even if my sales do no more than stay at this level, at the end of the year I will have earned back my investment and even made a little money.

With ebooks, the economic logistics of self-publishing are no longer overwhelming. But there was still another aspect of self-publishing that I struggled with. That is the—I wish there was another word—shame of it.

In my mind it was one thing to self-publish a memoir, or a local history book, or a cookbook, or almost any kind of non-fiction. I figure if you had the expertise and the work ethic to write such a book, you probably have something worthwhile to say. But self-publishing fiction was another matter. I figured there was a reason the companies that specialized in such things were called "vanity presses". Twenty, or even ten years ago, self-publishing meant you hadn't made it through the harsh world of the "gatekeepers", the agents and editors who winnowed out the real talent from the garbage of the slush pile. The general consensus among the published authors I knew was that if you couldn't sell your book to a real publishing house and get paid for it, it probably wasn't a very good book.

That's a pretty arrogant outlook. But looking back, I think that for many authors, the process of suffering through rejection after rejection before getting published was so agonizing, that we felt a need to differentiate ourselves from the writers who hadn't had to endure such torture. And, to be realistic, there was more than a little bit of truth to back-up our disdain.

I acquire fiction for a public library and every month I get donations of self-published novels accompanied by hopeful letters asking me to add them to the collection. I add some of these books, the ones that are fairly professional-looking and that are written in a genre that's popular with our patrons, or that have local or regional appeal.

What's intriguing is that back when I first held this position, the quality of these donated self-published books was pretty awful. But in the last few years, I've started to get books from writers who have some real talent and who can really tell a story. I no longer cringe when I come to work and see a brand new gift book from an unknown author on my chair. The fact is, it might well be something our patrons would enjoy. It seems to me that the gatekeepers are no longer "weeding out the drek", but often rejecting perfectly publishable books that just don't fit the needs of their house's marketing plan.

The same is true of my own rejections. At one time I felt like editors were rejecting my story because it wasn't personally appealing to them. Now I often get the sense that even if they really liked the story, they couldn't buy it. These letters and email rejections say things like: "What we really want is urban fantasy." "I can't buy a book set in this time period." "Doesn't stand out enough in a crowded market." "We already have an author writing in that sub-genre and we can't justify taking on another one." "We're no longer acquiring historical fantasy."

At one time, the general consensus was that the gatekeepers were making decisions based on the quality of the writing and the appeal of the story. Now it often seems as if they make decisions based solely on marketing objectives. I know many authors, including myself, who were once successfully published, who sold thousands of books and seemed to have a writing career going, who can no longer get published, despite years of serious effort.

What are you going to do if you're one of these writers, who once had the validation and approval of the gatekeepers, who clearly is capable of writing polished, interesting stories that readers once eagerly purchased, but who has since seen their career go down the toilet? Well, if you're like many of us, you're going to brush aside the stigma of self-publishing and re-enter the fray. Maybe we're self-published, but that doesn't mean we don't have readers willing to buy our books, or that we can't make money writing. We've gone around the gatekeepers, with their short-sighted marketing schemes. (If you only buy what's already selling, how are you ever going to find the books that are going to be the bestsellers of the future?) We've gone out on our own in the scary, often overwhelming world of self-publishing, and we've survived and even thrived. It's unlikely we're ever go back to being at the mercy of the traditional publishing industry. Maybe it's their turn to agonize and worry.

This Blog, Plotting and Muses

I have another blog I started about a year ago: http://marygillgannon.blogspot.com/   On it I share stories about my books:  what inspired me, cool things I've learned in my research, thoughts of interest to my readers. I decided I needed another blog to share some of my writing journey with other writers and with friends. So here it is.

I titled it "Into the Mist" because that's how I always explain how I write. Little plotting or planning, just an idea and a blank screen and I start writing. Over the years I've attended at least a dozen workshops on plotting and outlining but it never works for me. I sit down with the plotting template or grid or whatever tool the presenter utilizes and then my brain freezes. Nothing comes to me; my mind is blank. My muse runs and hides.

I think that's because my muse is the little girl I used to be. The little girl who used to tell herself stories for hours, riding her bike outdoors on the sidewalk or skateboarding in the basement. Around and around in circles, lost in imaginary adventures. That little girl was not a plotter. That would mean planning and organizing and she didn't do that. She was spontaneous, messy and emotional, and kind of a problem child.

Over the years, she learned to be more organized, to plan and follow schedules and rules. It was the way females were supposed to be. And when she had children, she had no choice. As a working mother, planning and organizing were essential to survival.

But when that woman—me—sits down to write, she has to go back to being that little girl. Because that little girl is the creative one, the one who can imagine she is a cat, or a boy or black panther. She can slip into the magical realm of fantasy and the real world around her vanishes.

The writing trance, I call it. When things are going really well, I'm definitely in another place, far beyond the stresses and problems of everyday life. That joyous escape has led to ten published books, seven finished manuscripts and another dozen partially-written story ideas. Now that e-publishing has come along, some of those unpublished works are finally going to be available to readers. But that's a story for another post, coming soon.